Prepare a Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet
by Lys ap Adin
Summary: Gokudera prefers it when Yamamoto isn't serious. Yamamoto, Gokudera, gen.


**Title:** Prepare a Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet**  
Characters:** Yamamoto, Gokudera**  
Summary:** Gokudera prefers it when Yamamoto isn't serious.**  
Notes:** Teen. For Round III of KHRfest, prompt _VI-22. Yamamoto – serious; "it's all fun and games until someone gets hurt"_. 1181 words.

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**Prepare a Face to Meet the Faces that You Meet **

They'd all seen Yamamoto get serious over some matter or another. He did it once a year like clockwork for some baseball playoff or another--Hayato made a point of not knowing anything about it and would have even denied knowing that it was something to do with baseball if he'd thought he could get away with it--and spent several days running on next to no sleep as he watched coverage from half the world away in his every spare moment, by turns elated and dejected, depending on how his team was doing. Yamamoto took it all _very_ seriously and was fully capable of discussing games at length with anyone who would stand still long enough to listen. Whenever the playoffs or whatever they were finally ended, he usually landed facedown on the nearest flat surface and passed out there. When he woke up again, he'd be back to normal.

(One year, Yamamoto was too busy with the thing with the Tomasso to be able to watch. Hayato planned on denying to his very dying day that he had been the one to record every last game for the idiot to come home to. Not that he cared about having done it for Yamamoto, but it meant enduring three solid days of Yamamoto's baseball insanity, instead of having it all spread out over a couple of weeks. Somehow the concentrated crazy was even worse than the regular crazy, and Hayato didn't want anyone knowing who to blame.)

Yamamoto's clearly insane love of baseball aside, they were also all aware that he got a certain way about the sword, maybe even more than he did about baseball. It stood to reason; he'd given up playing baseball for his sword, which meant that he was pouring double the intensity into a single activity. Hayato couldn't entirely disapprove of that; Yamamoto's sword served the Tenth, so it was only appropriate for him to be obsessive about it. And he _was_ obsessive. Yamamoto spent at least an hour every morning doing kata when other matters didn't intervene, and that didn't even count the time he spent sparring with Hibari or Squalo or whomever else could be harried into it. Yamamoto had an unhealthy obsession with fights, too. He wasn't as overtly crazy for them as, say, Hibari was, but he didn't _mind_ them, either, which Hayato felt was just a little disturbing. Especially since he suspected Yamamoto of thinking of them as being _fun_.

He'd made the mistake of thinking that Yamamoto didn't take his fights seriously, a long time ago. In his own defense, Hayato would point to the fact that Yamamoto liked to mask his seriousness with an easy grin and goofy jokes, so that if one took him at face value, it would _seem_ like Yamamoto thought the whole thing was one big game. And Yamamoto _did_ make it difficult to see past the surface that he projected. Between that and the fact that Yamamoto's sense of humor was skewed about twenty degrees from normal, Hayato maintained that it wasn't entirely his fault that he didn't realize (at first) that Yamamoto took games almost more seriously than anything else. That was a different side to Yamamoto, one that Hayato wished they got to see more of, sometimes--it was a nice change from how goofy Yamamoto could be and Hayato had wished, more than once, that Yamamoto would cut the crap, so to speak, and act appropriately serious during fights.

The way Hayato figured it, that the still, intense way Yamamoto got when he was in the middle of a fight, all centered focus and calm was what Yamamoto looked like when he got serious. And it was a hell of a lot more appropriate that the jokes and silliness.

Turned out that he'd been wrong about that.

He found out when during what was _supposed_ to have been a routine meeting, when the Pozzo Nero pulled guns on the Tenth, the bastards. Hayato reacted to that without even thinking about it, hurling himself at the Tenth and knocking him right out of his chair, covering him with his own body. He didn't even realize that he'd been shot at first, being more concerned with getting the Tenth out of the line of fire, but it turned out he had--nothing serious, just a clean hole through his bicep that would hurt like a bitch while it had healed and leave a neat round scar to show for it. The whole thing must have happened in the space of seconds, but Hayato remembered each moment of it like they were distinct eternities. That was probably thanks to the magic of adrenaline. The impact of the bullet that struck him barely registered with Hayato. Neither had the pain, at first.

The sound that Yamamoto made did. It was something angry and too primal to contain actual words. Hayato was too busy with the Tenth and going for his gun or a bomb or _something_ while he tried to figure out why his arm wasn't working properly, so he missed the first moment when Yamamoto's face changed, but he saw the aftermath of it just fine. Yamamoto moved through the Pozzo Nero like the god of death himself, cutting them down with a fluid, economical precision and an expression that was swept clean of anything but a distant sort of calculation--as long as one didn't look at his eyes. They were blazing with a kind of fury that Hayato hadn't even realized Yamamoto could muster.

The Tenth stopped him with a word--his name--when Yamamoto's sword was sweeping towards the Pozzo Nero boss's throat. Yamamoto stopped at the command. He stood motionless as Pozzo Nero dropped his gun and held his hands up, face bleached white and Yamamoto's sword resting against his skin, drawing a thin line of blood that trickled down and stained Pozzo Nero's collar. The Tenth spoke to him again, gently, directing him to put the sword away and see to Hayato.

And Yamamoto did, with a quick twisting of his wrist that flicked the blood off his blade. Then he turned to Hayato and the smile slid back over his face like a curtain sweeping across a stage as he stooped over Hayato and put pressure on the wound, and cracked a stupid joke as he did.

They got very good trade concessions from the Pozzo Nero after that meeting, and Hayato stopped complaining about Yamamoto's jokes after that. He still wanted to pretend, sometimes, that Yamamoto's jokes were all there was to him, but there was a scar on his shoulder that wouldn't let him, which was almost too bad.

As obnoxious as Yamamoto's bad jokes could be, Hayato preferred them to the stranger with the burning eyes and the unsmiling mouth, who was really kind of terrifying. What was more, Yamamoto clearly knew it, because why else would he have gotten so good at wearing that jester's mask in the first place?

All things considered, Hayato was _very_ glad that Yamamoto was on their side.

**end**

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